The first recording by Indiana jazz band The Happy Harmonists, later known as Hitch’s Happy Harmonists, after bandleader and pianist Curtis Hitch.
Most information about this band pegs them as fawning acolytes of Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverine Orchestra – or mentions them only in reference to recording Hoagy Carmichael’s first tunes (“Washboard Blues” and “Boneyard Shuffle”).
It is important to note that at the time of this recording of their original composition “Home Brew Blues” in September of 1923, Bix and his Wolverine Orchestra had only just played their first show at the Stockton Club in Ohio – and didn’t record their first record for Gennett for another six months. And their collaboration with Carmichael was still two years away.
The Happy Harmonists were based in Evansville, Indiana – a city right across the river from Kentucky – so far south that it was closer to Louisville than it was to Indianapolis. They were part of a midwestern territorial jazz scene about which historian Merrill Hammond remarked, “There was a whole separate style of midwest jazz playing, and no one seems to remember that. It flourished in and around Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio long before the so-called ‘Chicago style’ became well-known.”
Hoagy Carmichael opined on this scene in his memoirs, writing, “In the farmlands among the Indiana-Iowa corn, and from the cow-pasture universities, there sprouted a beardless priesthood of jazz players and jazz composers. Instead of buttermilk and Blackstone, we were nurtured on bathtub gin and rhythm. . . It just happened, like a thunder cloud. It may sound sentimental to say that young men caught fire in a quest for beauty, that they dedicated themselves to its realization, starving and striving, laughing, dreaming, and dying.”
0:00 Intro
0:10 Clarinet solo (Wright)
0:44 Cornet solo (Rollison)
1:02 Bass sax solo (Neal)
1:26 Ensemble
1:55 Cornet and Clarinet
Recorded in Richmond, Indiana, on September 19, 1923.
Released as Gennett 5286.
Credits:
Curtis Hitch – piano, director
Fred Rollison – cornet
Jerry Bump – trombone
Harry Wright – clarinet
Rookie Neal – C Melody Sax
Dewey Neal – baritone sax
Maurice Mays – banjo
Earl McDowell – drums
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